Is it true, as the Guardian writes, that the Italian media is full of Putin supporters? In fact, Russians’ desire to take over a piece of Ukraine finds such passionate support in no other European country. There are pacifists and geopolitical experts in London and Paris too, but only here do they argue that the only way to end the war and stabilize the world is to give victory to the Russian despot.
However, calling them Putinians is an approach I have sometimes fallen for, and I apologize for it. Analysts and tribunals on the right and left who deny the existence of any essential difference between Eastern autocracies and Western democracies do not like the Russian or Chinese model. They just hate the American one. If Biden allied with Putin tomorrow, they would blame everything on Zelensky’s side. For many of them, America did not liberate us in 1945. It kept us busy. He threw out the Nazi fascists and prevented the communists from taking their place. He handed over power to partisans of secular and Catholic descent in exchange for joining the English-speaking empire. They think (certainly in good faith) that in order to defend our quality of life and the welfare state, it is better to distance ourselves from Washington. But they underestimate (certainly in good faith) that the great powers are not all equal and that, despite thousands of distortions, the part of the world that belongs to the United States remains the only one where individual freedom still matters.
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